Ok, this has me a bit confused. I'll start by saying I'm not a complete newbie to Linux, or even Gentoo. My first Linux system was Gentoo 1.4, without success since I was clueless, but I managed to make it work after about 2 days of reading and trying and trying again. This one is a bit new to me in one way, I've never tried to use an IDE Controller for anything but storage and never tried to run one with a Linux system. The system is an AMD XP 2800+ with 2GB ram. On the board, a DVD ROM and a DVD-RW along with 1 80GB WD, 1 160GB Maxtor. The Controller runs 1 80GB Maxtor and 1 160GB WD. I have no space as of now on the main drives, so I was attempting to run it on an 80GB partition off the 160.

Now, I burned the Sabayon DVD (3.4, day after release) at 8x and checked the MD5. All was well with both. (The disc is fine, I installed it on a laptop not 2 days ago, all went like a charm).

The problem, as the title states, there is no GRUB at all. I've made a very stupid attempt to try and install it on all the hard disks MBRs and it still gives me no result. That confused the hell out of me since I expected an error, at the very least, to work with. Nothing. The 2003/XP bootloader still comes up without a hitch. Virus warning on the motherboard is off, i checked and double checked it. (I've made that mistake before.)

The only problem I can guess to be causing it is something I've never seen before since, as I've said, I never used an IDE Controller on a Linux system. The system isn't reporting the HDDs as I'd expect. It brings the IDE Controller HDDs first, then the 2 system HDDs. This is also why I haven't as of yet moved the 160 to the system itself. I dont think it will have any effect except to place it as /dev/sdc or sdd instead of /dev/sdb that it had it marked now.

Any one have any idea how to fix this? I've been waiting a long while for 3.4 and enough time to install and configure it. (Finally managed 2 days off in a row for the first time in 4 months.) Now, I'm a day at a loss and still no further then before. I'm guessing its the IDE controller, but I'm not sure how to fix it since I'm assuming that even if I disconnect the controller, install, and reconnect, it will make it worse since the disks will come up wrong again.

I was hoping to find a fix to it on Google and the forums here, but without luck. Several people say to recompile the kernel and have it read the disks in the opposite manner, but that seems pointless since I cant even get it to install the MBR for Grub as of yet, much less recompile a kernel for a reboot. Another post I was reading said to force Grub to read the HDDs differently by directing it to take HD(0) as HD(1) and flipping it for 1 to 0. But still, at a loss since I cant get a MBR up to allow my system to run.

Also, the system took Linux just fine 3 months back when I didnt have the controller. I just didnt have time to configure Gentoo to what I was hoping for so removed the partitions for storage on the 2003 system. (Hard to get 2 room mates (unfortunately, in my case, both women) to let me fix it over a week or 2 of fiddling since I store all the data on this system. Music, their school work, etc...)

Any helps appreciated at this point... Until then, I always have 2003 to serve for now and Linux on my laptop.

i've had the same problem with 3.4e for the past few days now. the full install and the bootloader config update option both write nothing to the mbr(also ran the update installer in the livecd). right now i've got grub comming up to a command prompt(installed it off another distro), but with this it's not reading the grub.conf file unless you manually tell it where it is from the prompt. I'm not really suprised since this is a really hack-and-slash way of doing it.

i'm not sure about my ide controller or what impact that has, but my motherboard is an asus a8n-sli delux, and i'm running 4 HDs. sda,b,d all have one partition and are data only. sdc1 is my windows partiton, sdc2 is /boot, and sdc3 is the lvm vol with / and the swap partitions(all under the hd0 label in the grub prompt).

I must also mention that i'm new to going to forums for this since i usually just bang my head against the wall untill i find an answer, but all i've got is a hole in my wall from which i really doubt an answer's going to crawl out If any info is needed please tell me

A few years ago I remember having this problem with gentoo. I remember something about having to manually map the drives system.map might have been the file name. I'll try to find more info. but that might be a good place to start looking.

I ended up without internet for a few days after posting that, completely unrelated. Verizon just seems to hate me lately. All the same, shortly after getting internet back I found a backwards (or so i think) solution to it. I used Bootpart on the 2003 system to add a chainload from windows bootloader into Grub. I was actually stunned that it worked but happy that it did. I ran out of time off to reconfigure the system into a proper local file server and convert all my existing ntfs data to ext3. So unfortunately I still have 2k3 server running on it temporarily. I'll be running Sabayon full time on the system come late next week when I have a small 5 day vacation coming up. That will give me plenty of time to make everything run perfect.